His death came on the same day a judge issued an order granting a request for the 89-year-old to be extradited to Germany to face trial.

A man accused of being an SS "Death Head" guard at the Auschwitz concentration camp and taking part in the killing of 216,000 Jews had died in America while waiting extradition.

Johann 'Hans' Breyer passed away in a Philadelphia hospital on Tuesday night according to his lawyer.

His death came on the same day a judge issued an order granting a request for the 89-year-old to be extradited to Germany to face trial.

US authorities arrested Breyer on a German arrest warrant before he was held without bail after appearing in a federal court charged with 158 counts of complicity in the commission of murder.

Each count represented a train load of Nazi prisoners from Hungary, Germany and Czechoslovakia who were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau between May 1944 and October 1944.

Breyer was born in 1925 in what was then Czechoslovakia to a German father and an American mother, Katharina.

He arrived in America in 1951 before settling in his mother's home town Philadelphia where he married and raised his three children.

Last month he hobbled into court in a purple prison uniform, stooped and with a cane before waving at his wife Shirley.

The pensioner, a retired toolmaker, had mild dementia and heart issues and has suffered strokes in the past, his lawyer said.

Prosecutor had charged him with “complicity in the commission of murder,” claiming he helped in the “systematic murder of hundreds of thousands of European Jews, transported between May 1944 and October 1944 in 158 trainloads to Auschwitz.”

Breyer was one of the last members of the SS “Death’s Head” Nazi battalion.

He would have been the oldest person ever extradited from the US to face allegations of Nazi crimes.

Two years ago he admitted he was a guard at Auschwitz in occupied Poland during World War II,where more than one million Jews were gassed to death.

However he denied any responsibility in the deaths saying he was ignorant of the executions at the camp.

“Not the slightest idea, never, never, ever,” Breyer said in 1992. “All I know is from the television. What was happening at the camps, it never came up at that time.”

He said he was stationed outside the death camp part and had nothing to do with the slaughter.

But prosecutors said his mere presence at the camp is enough to merit his extradition.

“He is charged with aiding and abetting those deaths,” Assistant US Attorney Andrea Foulkes said last month.

“Proof doesn’t require him to have personally pulled any levers. His guarding made it possible for those killings to happen.”